This is The Gunsmiths, a SE7EN.WS collection about videogames’ favorite interplay: taking pictures individuals straight within the face. There isn’t any scarcity of nice video games the place gunplay is the primary draw, so we needed to dig down into these video games’ interior workings, breaking them aside at a device bench, and seeing the elements unfold out throughout its floor. For our third within the collection, it’s the retro gibs of Turok 2.
Turok 2 was born from a singular imaginative and prescient: to take advantage of spectacular videogame weapons for the time. Instead of a knife, Turok wields a dagger-strapped knuckleduster known as the WarBlade. A knife clearly simply wasn’t sufficient. Ordinary weapons wouldn’t do, both. Though the sport does have a variety of conventional firearms, it additionally options weapons such because the Razor Wind – a round, bladed boomerang that gibs enemies with each throw – and the Cerebral Bore, a homing drill that burrows into an enemy’s head, ultimately popping it in a fountain of claret.
Both of these weapons had been impressed by Krull and Phantasm, motion pictures that David Dienstbier, undertaking lead and lead designer, had grown up with. The tech on the time was cutting-edge – the Nintendo 64 allowed the staff to do issues that had by no means been seen earlier than. This meant they may actually push what these weapons may do, each visually and mechanically. Take the Sunfire Pods, a throwable weapon that stuns enemies – if you happen to use one in opposition to the subterranean ‘Blind Ones’, their susceptibility to daylight sees them spontaneously combust.
“We were also able to add purely utilitarian items like flares because we had superior lighting in Turok 2,” Dienstbier recollects. “That was not solely neat, however was helpful for getting cleaner photographs with weapons. We tried to increase on how the weapons seemed on display screen in addition to how they could influence gameplay. Our tech made so many issues doable. When the limb dismemberment tech was given the inexperienced mild, it drove a lot of the weapon design decisions. The Cerebral Bore was a dream of mine that wanted not solely the monitoring, influence, drilling, and accompanying gouts of purple and grey matter, it needed to have the massive end by blowing off the poor sap’s head.”
This over-the-top violence was on the gory core of Turok 2’s satisfying gunplay. The recreation’s rendering system, for instance, confirmed each bullet impacts and blood spatter on the bottom, partitions, and ceiling, permitting you to color the degrees crimson with each cranium you bore. This was difficult to implement. Firstly, as a result of the decals wanted to cease rendering on the sting of partitions. Secondly, as a result of the staff needed to deal with optimisations to maintain the body charge in examine as the degrees acquired busier, filling up with player-created mess.
“In addition to weapon and enemy blood decal effects, we also gave the designers and artists the ability to build and place destructible geometry throughout the environment that could be triggered with weapon fire or from the level scripting system,” tech lead Steve Broumley tells me. “We [also] improved the Turok 2 enemy rendering and animation system so that weapon impacts could trigger mesh swaps along with simultaneous animation state swaps. Combining the two, we created very satisfying enemy limb dismemberment and head decapitation effects. This kind of thing had never been seen on the N64 before.”
The hit collision tech was equally overhauled for this sequel. The recreation would register precisely the place every projectile hit, so blood would gush from each influence. It is due to this which you could impale enemies with exploding arrows, filling them up like a pincushion, seeing them animate as they proceed to come back after you earlier than they lastly explode like a purple, meaty geyser.
“The collision system allowed players to not only damage enemies, but damage specific body parts,” lead artist Alan Johnson explains. “Shooting a leg or arm off gave a much more realistic feel than previous games. Head shots could literally remove an enemy’s head. There was a bit of over-the-top gore to emphasise this, which really helped make the weapons feel destructive. When creating the characters, we made sure they were set up to be ripped apart in various ways to show bones and organs.”
From a technical perspective, then, Turok 2 was forward of just about every part else on the console. Its particle system was in contrast to something anybody had seen, due to some texture mirroring methods and lowered color codecs, letting the staff squeeze out greater resolutions on the miniscule 4KB of texture RAM they needed to work with on the N64. “In addition to handling a ton of individual impact particles, we also implemented a streaming particle system to create the glowing flame thrower and curdling blood gushing effects,” Broumley says.
Of course, these enemies wouldn’t be satisfying to gib if they only stood round doing nothing. Luckily, the AI was drastically improved for the sequel, due to pathfinding strategies and ‘look at target’ and ‘move to target’ instructions. Due to the restraints of the system GPU, the AI was fastidiously tailor-made to maintain the body charge excessive, meticulously engineered to suit inside these constraints. One of the methods they used was to permit just one enemy per body to make use of pathfinding, holding the body charge excessive whereas additionally giving off the phantasm to the participant that there was extra happening.
“These features alone gave the enemies much more realistic movement and behaviour,” Broumley remembers. “I still remember revealing for the first time the pathfinding algorithm in action – we had an enemy navigate around a tricky cliff path towards the player’s location, all the while looking at and shooting at the player. The enemies suddenly acted intelligently and didn’t just walk over the edge of the cliff in a straight line towards the player. During development, we built upon this even more and implemented a flocking system, where one enemy would be the leader for the other enemies to follow.”
The staff additionally carried out new enemy reactions for the sequel.. “Some enemies would attempt to take cover behind objects in the world,” Dienstbier says. “And when locked onto by a particularly gruesome weapon would run around in a state of panic.”
All of this effort would have fallen flat with out audio, nevertheless. Back then, groups didn’t have the luxurious of going out and performing intensive foley work for his or her sounds, a lot of the audio was combined from a sound library. Gunshots had been blended with different gunshots, and people sounds had been layered over with different noises, comparable to explosions, to essentially make issues go growth.
“We didn’t have the memory resources to use a lot variations, so crafting the weapon sounds didn’t require vast amount of source material like it does today,” lead audio designer Marc Schaefgen tells me. “We also were not worried at all about authenticity, it just needed to sound satisfying. The pistol was actually mostly a majorly distorted version of a recording we did at an indoor range in Austin. Many people did not like the pistol sound because it didn’t sound powerful enough, and that was the one that was most like a real gun. Dave was very supporting of the fact that for the big weapons to sound big, the little weapons needed to be not so big. If you compare the pistol to the double barrel shotgun blast, there is quite a huge difference. This is one of the things I think that helps make the weapons feel balanced is that the visual and audio effects have a balance.”
So it goes like this: the booming gunshot audio indicators the shot out of your weapon, the bullet influence decides which elements get gored, then the ragdoll animations kick in to ship a corpse careening. Internally, the staff known as this sequence of occasions ‘crazy awesome violent deaths’, and lots of the human dying noises had been really Dienstbier screaming right into a mic.
Bringing all this into the fashionable age was the duty of remaster specialists Nightdive Studios. Rather than messing with the unique property, they added widescreen assist, antialiasing, shadow maps, and post-process results like per-bone movement blur, that means trendy gamers may bask within the nostalgia – and gore – of the unique recreation with out it shedding any of its N64-era allure. As for the sound, the staff opted to transform to the N64 model’s audio, because it was superior to the older PC model of the unique.
“The challenge there is that everything in the game’s ROM file was compressed and tightly packed into chunked archives, and none of the documentation for the internal formats survived, so there was a bit of reverse engineering involved in getting at the data,” software program engineer James Haley tells me. “We had to consider how to best render the sounds in a modern OpenAL audio engine. We added a low-pass filter effect to eliminate high-pitched noise from upsampling to 44kHz, for example, which gives a smooth experience for the listener. We needed to re-implement features like pitch shifting and looping to work with the Kex Engine as well, and all of these are controlled through its sound shader system.”
Updating the audio and visuals for the remaster was not the most important problem. The staff additionally needed to make the multiplayer operate on trendy machines. To complicate issues, Turok 2 had two completely different multiplayer variations – the outdated PC construct and N64 – every with completely different maps and weapons. “We made the decision to merge them together, and then write a completely new netcode to handle all of it for online multiplayer,” lead multiplayer developer Edward Richardson explains. “The netcode also handled synchronisation of some of the unique weapons in Turok 2, such as the Cerebral Bore, which in the end required the server to tell clients to execute a specific script. Testing multiplayer was a lot of fun, and we continued to play it well past launch, so merging the two worked out well.”
Despite all these upgrades, Turok 2 nonetheless feels nice due to its stable foundations, all of them constructed round that single ideally suited: make one of the best weapons. This alien armoury, very like the more and more loud weapon sounds, slowly ramps up as you play. “The ramping of the weapons both in terms of what they do, how they look, and the impact they have on enemies really was about making the players feel that they were the baddest guy in this world,” Dienstbier says.
“Whenever a brand new problem or enemy offered itself, we needed the gamers to really feel at a drawback initially, however to be rewarded by discovering weaponry that felt like now the tables had been turned. Now the enemies had higher take word, as a result of Turok was on a rampage. So the complete technique to the insanity was about progress, reward, and outcomes that aligned with our – my? – admittedly somewhat single-minded objective to make Turok weaponry one of the best gaming weapons on the time.”
So the following time you might be splatting some dinosaur hybrid’s head with a Cerebral Bore, watching as his insides flip to outsides and embellish the partitions, spare a thought for all of the elements that match collectively to make all of it work. Show some appreciation for the gunsmiths.
To see Turok 2 in motion you possibly can watch us play it over on Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube.
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